An engaging archive of Dylan’s own perspective on his artistic process and ever changing cultural significance.
A dense compendium of significant feature interviews with Bob Dylan.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Cott (There's a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak, 2017, etc.), who contributes two interviews, discusses Dylan’s intimidating nature as a subject given his reputation for fungible autobiography: “His life story changed as he proceeded onward in his journey….You would also never know what his voice was going to sound like.” These 34 interviews illustrate how Dylan’s role in society changed over time, following his days as a precocious folk singer (the earliest interview dates from 1962). Some well-known interlocutors appear, ranging from Studs Terkel and Nat Hentoff to Sam Shepard and Jonathan Lethem, who characterizes Dylan in 2006 as “not impatient, but keenly alive to the moment, and ready on a dime to make me laugh and to laugh himself.” Despite Dylan’s reputation for “dislik[ing] interviews for years because he’s always asked to reveal something about his personal life or to interpret his lyrics,” he generally comes across as cheerful and generous, if mischievously opaque. The earlier interviews show him grappling with fame and influence against the chaotic backdrop of the 1960s. Regarding his departure from political songwriting, he observed in 1965, “you can make all sorts of protest songs and put them on a Folkways record. But who hears them?” In the 1970s, interviewers tracked his strange side projects, such as the four-hour film Renaldo and Clara, which coincided with his painful divorce, and his controversial excursions into born-again Christianity. By the 1980s, interviews showcased Dylan as a resurgent elder statesman of rock, a recurring motif throughout the last interview here, Douglas Brinkley’s long 2009 feature in Rolling Stone, in which Brinkley writes, “everyone feels energized by his charismatic presence.” The overall effect is an immersion in a singular figure’s life, though a fuller chronology of Dylan’s recordings and accomplishments might have provided accessibility for neophytes.
An engaging archive of Dylan’s own perspective on his artistic process and ever changing cultural significance.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7319-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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